Badges of Geekness

As noted in the earlier BoG post, there's just some things that game geeks know. I'm not talking about the stuff that floats freely about the spheres, but that which bubbles below the crust of the Geek world. The stuff that's above the crust tends to be non-worthy of a BoG (like knowing the names of the secret identities of the most popular superheroes). This is the stuff that even the non-geek surface dwellers find out, thanks to summer superhero blockbusters, etc. That kind of pop culture stuff is all above crust. No more badges handed out for that info!

Anything of "ours" that has been jammed into a digestable movie format or tv series just ain't that special anymore. When most of the residents of a retirement community know that Bruce Wayne is Batman, it's over for that super. Ask them who Hawkman is though, and you'll get the normal glazed over stare...

But this post isn't supposed to be about supers. That's not the angle of my geek. It's just that supers have probably made the most cross-over to the surface, and so provide the easiest examples. There's not a whole bunch of sword-n-sorcery stuff that has made this journey. I'm hazarding a guess that if it has, it has gone from novella to comic to movie (like Conan), the exception being The Lord of the Rings. Surface dwellers were exposed to Hobbits, Middle Earth, the Ring and the Fellowship, thanks to P. Jackson and Co. This knowledge will be reinforced when The Hobbit is released as a blockbuster, too. So, some of the special warmth of our coveted secret knowledge will be sent to the ether for mass consumption.

This just means we have to dig deeper for our sword-n-sorcery badges of geekness. Now, this post went nowhere to the point I was trying to make, which was about my BoG for my limited Tolkien knowledge. And, as this post is on the brink of blather, I'll bail out pronto, quoting some Gandalf...

Keep it secret!

Keep it safe!

(And I have no clue who Hawkman is...)